Off-road Robotics—An Overview

Abstract

This article gives an overview of the current state of research in the field of off-road robotics. It focuses on techniques used in the areas of perception, environment representation, as well as navigation, and introduces different types of robot control systems. A presentation of different applications is given along with an outlook on future developments.

Space Robotics: Towards an Architecture for Autonomous Mobile Manipulation

“…The general difficulty in outdoor applications is that the environment is usually not structured, and certain properties such as, for example, traversability cannot generally be assumed [21]. On the other hand, outdoor environments in most circumstances provide a richer interaction between the body of a robot and its surroundings.…”

“…However, in some situations, such as urban canyons or tree canopies, GPS does not necessarily provide the accuracy required and it may not even be available at all. The main alternatives to GPS for outdoor localization of mobile robots are usually vision based or use some form of laser range finding [21]. The increase in processing power has made it more feasible to extend the 2-D Bayesian methods to 3-D representations of the environment.…”

Robots for Field Operations with Comprehensive Multilayer Control

“…Today robots and autonomous machines have been investigated and used for several agricultural applications [2,3,14,15,23]. Furthermore, a yearly student competition with small robots is conducted, where tasks are field operations with an agricultural background [28].…”

Distributed Coordination and Task Assignment of Autonomous Tandem Rollers in Road Construction Scenarios

“…While it is still an open research problem, behavior-based control systems (BBS) present a promising approach to conquer these challenges. They are highly modular and run parallel components with overlapping functionality to increase robustness [2]. Also, swarm robotics are widely studied and there exist various approaches to handle the complex coordination tasks of robot interaction [3].…”